Preparing students and families to thrive in the gene age

Every gene has a distinctive history? Eric Lander

Description:

Interviewee: Eric Lander
Eric Lander talks about every gene has a distinctive history.

Transcript:

Every gene has its own distinctive history. Take the smell receptor genes, we have a thousand smell receptor genes in our genome, and that says that our vertebrate forebears were really, really interested in olfaction as a sense. And then you look at them and you find out that two-thirds of them are broken, they've all accumulated mutations in the past tens of millions of years, saying that somehow our more recent hominid ancestors lost interest in smell.